FEATURES Figures of
funThe US army claimed to have
killed 54 insurgents in a gun battle in Samarra this week, but, says
Julian Manyon, it turns out that only eight died, and some of
them were civilians Baghdad

It is a sad fact that most
people can see things only through the prism of their own television
culture. Thus for the American soldiers of the 4th Infantry
Division, Taskforce Iron Horse, the dusty towns and villages north
of Baghdad seem to have become a sort of Wild West where gangs of
outlaws must be ridden down and given summary justice. Sunday’s
clashes in Samarra — billed by US spokesmen in stories that went
round the world as their biggest victory since the end of full-scale
fighting — had all the classic ingredients. The American white hats
were delivering money to the town’s banks when they were ambushed by
the black hats. The Americans were quicker on the draw and no fewer
than 54 black hats perished in a hail of well-aimed gunfire. In the
next scene the American commander should perhaps have been thanked
by the grateful citizens of Samarra to the strains of ‘Clementine’.
In fact, when I and other reporters reached the town, we found
confusion, anger and a story that bore little resemblance to the
made-for-TV version. It’s a story that gives the lie to Donald
Rumsfeld’s airy claim that he doesn’t ‘do’ quagmires, for what
happened in Samarra is something of an object lesson in how to make
one.

Samarra was part of Saddam’s cherished Sunni
heartland, and was once the splendid seat of eight successive
Abbasid caliphs. Today it is a lawless and desperate place. The US
forces have no permanent presence but are camped in heavily
fortified positions a dozen miles away. From there they conduct
periodic raids. On the city’s outskirts is a checkpoint of the ‘new’
Iraqi army, where the men wear ski masks, apparently to protect
their identities from those who would see them as collaborators.
‘There is no middle ground here,’ I was told by Ibrahim, a
surprisingly polite employee of the struggling municipality. ‘You
are either with the Americans or against them, and no one here is
with them.’

His remarks were perhaps coloured by the
firestorm that had engulfed parts of the town on Sunday. The
aftermath showed all the signs of the US army’s normal response to
threat: massive firepower used to ‘win’ the engagement; casualties
and damage that breed future hatred. It was clear that US forces had
indeed been ambushed at least twice: near the hospital and near what
their spokesman called the ‘Golden Mosque’ which is, in fact, the
magnificent shrine of two Shia Imams, that history has left stranded
in Sunni territory. In both places buildings were splattered with
bullet holes and vehicles literally shredded by automatic fire. In
front of the hospital was a small bus with its front torn off by
heavy machine-gun rounds and its interior still containing
blood-stained debris from its passengers. Some of the rounds had
passed through or over the bus and smashed into a small mosque about
50 yards behind it, where a large pool of blood congealed near the
doorway.

The US military spokesman, who caused an excited
ITV news desk to wake me at 1 a.m., claimed that they had defeated
co-ordinated attacks by about 200 ‘terrorists’, some wearing the
uniform of the feared Saddam fedayeen. We arrived half-expecting to
see the bodies of dead insurgents littering the streets. Instead, at
the town cemetery, we found that one of the first bodies to be
buried under the speedy Muslim rite was that of a female employee of
the town’s drugs factory, Ameera Salih, who had been shot dead while
waiting for a bus near the factory gate. Surprisingly, only six
fresh graves had been dug at the cemetery and hospital officials
finally put the death toll not at 54 but at eight. Inside the
hospital were about 30 wounded. Some were young men of military age,
one of whom admitted to having fired at the Americans out of anger
at their repeated raids in Samarra. ‘They claim we are terrorists,’
he told reporters. ‘So, OK, we are terrorists. What do they expect
when they drive among us?’

Other beds contained old men and
a small boy hit in the crossfire. The truth of this feat of American
arms appears to be something like this: relatively small numbers of
Saddam loyalists and local men fired on the American convoys and
were met with a blizzard of machine-gun and automatic grenade fire.
The dead numbered some eight or ten, about half of whom may have
been insurgents, but also included the lady from the drugs factory,
a child and an elderly Iranian pilgrim who had come to pray at the
historic shrine. The splendid gold-plated doors of the sanctuary
where the 10th and 11th Shia Imams lie buried were pierced by half a
dozen bullets. One round passed straight through the inner enclosure
which contains the tombs of the two Islamic saints and punctured the
words ‘Prophet Mohammed’ in an ornate inscription quoting the Koran.
One worshipper was hit in the leg. The American commander, Col. Ryan
Gonsalves, declared that his men’s fire had been ‘aimed’.

A
malady appears to be taking hold in the American forces which those
of us who covered Vietnam are all too familiar with. The main
symptom is a reliance on bogus statistics, and the progress of the
disease is marked by ever-increasing separation from the reality on
the ground. For veterans of Saigon’s Five O’clock Follies, the
declarations of the 4th Infantry Division’s spokesman, Col.
Frederick Rudesheim, were a minor classic of the genre. Having
asserted that the ordinary people of Samarra supported the US effort
and were ‘fed up’ with the terrorists, he claimed that some of them
had shown their feelings by attacking the funerals of the people who
died on Sunday, a suggestion for which there was not the slightest
evidence and which he admitted was ‘anecdotal’.

And yet....
Iraq may be a quagmire, but it is no Vietnam. The insurgency is
localised, still concentrated in the so-called Sunni Triangle and a
few areas north and south of it. For all the previous dominance of
the Baath party, it is not rooted in a political ideology or, so far
at least, in a broad national movement. Above all, though it may
have support from the Islamist International, it has no reliable
supply line from the outside. Instead, it is a makeshift resistance
movement, born out of wounded pride in what was the ruling minority
group, out of ethnic and clan loyalties, religious chauvinism and,
above all, out of resentment at the perceived humiliations of
foreign occupation. The Americans need not fear that waves of
black-uniformed fedayeen will suddenly hurl themselves against their
fortresses. The greatest success that the insurgents can aspire to —
and this is still a significant one — is to turn large parts of Iraq
into an ungovernable no-man’s-land where American troops are
regularly being killed and where Washington’s proclaimed goal of
bringing democracy and progress appears as unrealisable as it does
in Samarra. This is where US forces can do themselves as much ill as
good. In responding to small-scale attacks by careering through the
town and shooting it up, they are steadily deepening what, given
Donald Rumsfeld’s sensibilities, is doubtless known in the Pentagon
as the Q-word.